Painting Fakes

Tomorrow evening is a function celebrating the 25th anniversary of the creation of Queensland Shelter , the State's peak housing organisation.  I helped create it back in 1987, so I get to say a few words.  Here they are, or at least some of them. 1987 was famous in Queensland history as the year the Tony Fitzgerald was commissioned to conduct a 6-week inquiry into police corruption in Queensland.  Less famously, it was also International Year of Shelter for the Homeless.  A few of us formed a State committee, got some money from Brotherhood of St Laurence, did roadshows around the State on housing and homelessness issues.  At the end of 1987 we were quite happy with what we had acheived, but we realised we were still a little short of our objective - ending homelessness in Queensland - so we decided to keep going.  We reconstituted ourselves as Queensland Shelter so we could be part of the nationwide network of Shelter organisations.   Helen Wallace, who is now my business

I've just been reading a marvellous book by Tom Fort, fishing correspondent for the British Financial Times (the Financial Times has a fishing correspondent? I hear you ask) called The Book of Eels.   I've always been aware of eels.  One of my early Australian memories is going with my family and some neighbours for a swim and picnic on the Logan River.  Us kids (I must have been about eight) were terrified to discover there was a large eel in the swimming hole, so our neighbour stuck a bit of sausage on the end of his fishing line and five minutes later the eel was writhing furiously in a bucket.  Later attempts at eel capture were less successful.  My mates and I used to play down at Stable Swamp Creek behind the Sunnybank train station.  Once during the wet season when the creek was bulging with recent rains we saw a huge eel.  We were convinced it was four feet long.  They can actually grow this big, but it's also possible it grew in the telling.  We went back late

Long ago, but not very far away, I was asked to cast my eye over the advertising poster for a youth event organised by my employer, and sponsored by the Queensland Health Department's anti-drug campaign.  They wanted a proof-read.  The names, location, dates and times were fine, but along the bottom it had a tag. Alcohol, tobacco and other drugs free. I burst out laughing, and asked the organisers if they really wanted it to say that.  They laughed too, and rang their contact in Queensland Health.  Yes, they really did want it to say that.  They were baffled.  What was the problem?  This tag-line went on everything they put out.  We laughed some more, and the posters went out as they were. At the time, I wondered if perhaps I was just a little bit too pedantic.  Now, however, I blame my youthful exposure to British television comedy.  My parents were big fans of any funny person with a British accent.  Political correctness had not yet been invented and so sexism and racism ran

Fellow blogger Brad posted this interesting rave about cross generational computer skills, in which he refers to the technologically illiterate baby boomers and the current generation who have such easy to use technology that it requires no knowledge.  The the most tech capable people are therefore sandwiched between these two generations. Anyway, this story popped into my head and I popped it into his comments box, but I liked it so thought I'd post it here too.  My depression/war generation Dad was one of the early users of computers in Brisbane.  He was an electrical engineer who designed giant transformers (the sort that convert electrical current, not the ones that turn into fighting robots).  In the late 1960s he used to go into the Computer Centre in the city and get them to put cards through their huge machines to work out complex equations for him. I didn't inherit any of his technological skills so I became a social worker and only started using computers w

Reading and blogging on the dreams and visions of Gary Johns over the weekend made me think, not for the first time, of one of my favourite little pieces of arcane literature. When my family emigrated from England in 1967, the Australian Immigration Department gave us a little booklet called Australia: Land of Surprises.   This was specifically written for English immigrant children by a person called Carol Odell, with illustrations by Emilie Beuth, to cushion us from the culture shock we would experience in this strange new land.  The book opens with a grand promise. Australia: What does it make you think of first? Kangaroos, sheep and the wide, open spaces?  If it does, this book is going to be full of surprises; but, when you have read it, you will know what Australia is really like. It then lists 31 surprising facts about Australia.  Some of these were indeed surprising to us.  Some would also have been quite surprising to long-standing Australian residents.  Amidst the w

I've just realised that it's now over thirty years since I was first let loose on the unsuspecting public as a young Social Work student on my first placement.  I spent most of the first half of 1981 at Brisbane's Royal Childrens' Hospital, supposedly providing social work support to the families of children in the hospital.  In actual fact, I was so shy and underconfident that I spent a lot of time hiding, trying to screw up my courage to approach parents on the ward. I partly thought of this because I just spent two days helping to run a conference for alcohol and drug organisations here in Brisbane.  One of the speakers, a long-time university teacher and researcher, revealed that while she likes her students be capable of really helping people, she often passes them on the basis that at least they won't do any harm.  I think that was probably me - in fact I'm almost certain it was because one of my lecturers told me so at the time.  In hindsight, it might

Some of my Facebook friends (or relatives to be more accurate) have been discussing British Prime Minister David Cameron's recent comments on the failure of "State multiculturalism".  Both Cameron's views, and those of my friends and family, are fascinating and enlightening.  Cameron particularly has some good ideas about building local cross-cultural relationships and promoting the ideals of democracy and free speech but for some reason seems to think this is different from multiculturalism.  Nor has he grappled with the implications of "liberal values".  It's easy to be liberal when everyone agrees, the challenge comes when someone spouts an idea you find offensive - how strong will your liberal values be then?  As an evaluator of social programs I also want to ask how the failure was judged.  What are the objectives of multiculturalism, and what evidence is there of its success or failure to acheive these objectives?  So often we use such terms loose

Sunnybank State School had a large collection of Readers Digest magazines.  They seemed to me to be already old by the time I read them in the early 1970s.  I was one of the most advanced readers in my class, so I spent plenty of time immersed in their pages while other classmates were still struggling with basic reading tasks like distinguishing was from saw . It was a strange world to inhabit and I still carry little bits of it around with me.  Many of the stories were childhood memoirs, written in the 1950s and 1960s about a time which seemed both harder and more innocent.  Children lived idyllic lives in small town America.  Their fathers went to work while their mothers stayed home and baked johnnycakes.  We never knew exactly what a johnnycake* was but this didn't prevent my friends from calling me "Cake" in the latter years of primary school. I suppose the stories were meant to strengthen our moral fibre, and God knows we needed it.  I'm a little hazy now

Happy New Year, everyone. I've been thinking for a while now about something that happened in school when I was about nine or ten.  One of my classmates was having some problems with his writing, and our teacher decided that he wasn't trying hard enough and a bit of public humiliation might sharpen him up.  So he stood him up and read out one of his essays to the class in a tone of biting sarcasm.  The rest of us squirmed in embarassment, torn between feeling sorry for him and being glad it wasn't us.  He may have cried, I can't remember that detail.  Nor can I remember the actual content of the essay but I clearly remember the problem.  It went something like this. "I walked down the street and there I was a red car.  I saw very excited to see it." You will imediately understand what was going on.  My classmate had dyslexia.  He mixed up his was and saw because he couldn't tell the difference.  It wouldn't matter how hard he tried, and how much

Over the past week I've been watching, in a half-hearted way, the coverage of the Commonwealth Games in Delhi.  Most of the world, even people in the Commonwealth, take no interest in this little colonial remnant.  Aussies love it because our athletes get to win a lot. So why am I only half-hearted?  I think the main reason is that Australian coverage of the event is so poor.  Australian broadcasters have determined (I'm not sure by what means) that Australian audiences are only interested in watching Australian athletes.  It's not that we just get to see events where Australians are competing.  It's that we only get to see the Australians, full stop.  For instance, an Australian, Fabrice Lapierre, won the mens long jump at these games with a jump of 8.30 metres - a full 60 centimetres shorter than Bob Beamon's 1968 effort .  Was this a surprise or was he the favourite?  Who did he beat?  Did he blow the field away with his first jump, or lag before coming thro

Somewhere around 1971 or 1972 one of my dad's friends gave me a pile of English sports magazines.  It was one of the best presents I ever got, although I think he was just clearing out junk.  There was a set of something which may have been called Football Monthly , and a pile of something that could have been called Sports Illustrated although it didn't have any swimsuit models.  They spanned a period from 1967 through to 1970, including the 1968 Olympics and the 1970 World Cup, both held in Mexico. I read those magazines over and over again,  partly because I would read anything and partly because I loved sport.  I was still young enough not to be blase about the unfolding drama.  The writers speculated about who would win the World Cup and patriotically promoted England's chances.  Then they gushed about the brilliance of the eventual Brazilian winners, and mourned the moments that cost England.  They ran over the form guide for the blue riband events in the Olympics,

I once worked for an organisation where the CEO was very focused on power*. It wasn't a very large organisation, but the role had a certain amount of profile and access to powerful people. My boss was a very large person. He was extremely clever and could also be very funny, especially when he told stories about himself. Once he told us about how he travelled on a airline and they asked him to move from the seat beside the emergency exit because he was too fat and might obstruct the other passengers. He told us, to uncontrollable laughter, how he had told them they needn't worry, in an emergency he wouldn't be in anyone's way because he'd be out so quick no-one would have time to be obstructed. Despite the self-deprecation, he never flew with that airline again. He had an office beside the front door, and positioned his desk so that he could look up at anyone coming or going from the building. He always made sure his chair was set higher than any others in the r

I'm going to break one of my blogging rules and talk about my work. After all, it's my blog and I can do what I want, and besides it's not the first time . When I was a young housing activist in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I spent a bit of time on the executive of National Shelter. This organisation was, and still is, Australia's peak non-profit housing advocacy organisation, and is basically a federation of State and Territory organisations. At this time, we had a small amount of funding from the Commonwealth Government so we had a couple of underpaid staff and were able to be active on the lobbying front in a low profile kind of way. However, the organisation as a whole was struggling. Very few of our State branches had any money, and most were like the Queensland branch I represented, a few people who would get together in whatever time we could make in our regular jobs. Representatives from the State and Territory branches used to meet once a quarter, over a Fri

Kutz has posed the question, "what does the bible say about competitive sport?". An important question for us Aussie blokes because we love our sport. In one sense it's an easy question to answer because the bible says nothing (or virtually nothing) about it. Well, not directly. I think the closest the Bible comes to sport is the story of David and Goliath. Goliath wanders about in front of the ranks, challenging the Israelites to send someone out to fight him one on one and decide the whole battle on that one contest. This is representative sport at its most serious, but they obviously don't mean quite what they say, because after David kills Goliath they have a massive battle anyway, which the Israelites win with great slaughter. Still, this is one way to look at sport - as a symbolic battle between competing groups of people. It took on a slightly different form at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, where the Nazi regime tried to use the contest to show the supremacy of

I don’t usually talk about my work on this blog, since I talk about it so much in the rest of my life. However, I had a curious experience recently. I’ve just taken on a bit of work around support for low income home purchasers, and to get a bit of historical context I tracked down a 1983 book called “The Great Australian Nightmare” by Jim Kemeny . I had never read this book, or even seen a copy, before the last couple of weeks. Yet its influence on my work has been huge. In the mid to late 1980’s this book was constantly quoted in articles on housing policy, and his arguments even if not attributed were the staple of left-wing housing comment. I was surprised, then, by a couple of things. First, how short the book is – at a little over 100 pages its volume hardly matches the weight it carries. Second, I was intrigued by the slightness and at times the confusion of its arguments. There was little data, a lot of assertion, and plenty of missing logical steps. His argument is rea